Discover Your Sales Strengths by Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano
Book Summary Review
"Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World's Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers" is by Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano.
This is not a "how to sell more" or a "how to close better" book but is about finding the right role in sales based on your inherent skills and abilities.
"Discover Your sales Strengths" is certainly a different way of looking at sales and is suitable for both sales people looking for new roles and also I recommend it to people who recruit salespeople.
The Great Sales Myths
- Education matters - not based on the research it doesn't. Top quartile performers didn't have advanced degrees.
- You have to be experienced - no it is more important that the role fits your strengths.
- A great salesman can sell anything - no you can be great in one job, mediocre in another if it requires different skills.
- There is a right approach to selling - yes but it's not based on the industry but your own strengths - see The Best Sales System or The Best Sales System For You.
- Poor performers need more training - it seems that training benefits the better performers more than the poor performers who are doing badly because of lack of fit with their personal skills.
- Relationship building is selling - not necessarily - people with great relationships may fail to translate that into sales while people average people skills can be top sales performers.
- All salespeople want is money - but research shows that different factors influence and motivate.
- You just have to want to be a great sales person - but desire isn't enough.
Strengths
Strengths are enhanced by our experiences, skills and knowledge but underneath is a natural talent.
Talent automatically conditions you to certain information you see and hear and influences your response. That's why different people in the same situation react differently.
The book then goes on to explain how to find your strengths.
Do You Have The Sales Manager You Deserve?
That's an interesting question isn't it that applies equally well outside the sales field?
See my article on the Peter Principle - it was provoked by the poor performance of the England football team and the sacking of the manager but I also look at the Peter Principle in a sales team.
Moving From Strengths To Fit
I found this section of the book really interesting although recruitment and staff selection are not my strongest areas of expertise so while the contents is new to me, it may not be to other people.
One thing that is going straight into my 8 Pillars to Business Prosperity coaching notes are the Q12 questions from Discover Your Sales Strengths.
These are the twelve questions that research shows are the most important in finding out what influences individual performance.
The way the questions are phrased is that you should ask them of yourself to see whether your job fits with your skills and preferences.
I'm not going to tell you what all 12 are but here is a flavour. How strongly do you agree with this statement:
"At work I get to do what I do best every day"
Interesting question isn't it?
We are good at what we enjoy and we enjoy what we are good at.
The Discover Your Sales Strengths book then moves from these generic questions to looking at what is required for success in a sales role by looking across the four dimensions of customer engagement - confidence, integrity, pride and passion.
It then goes on to look at the sales management role, which as my Peter Principle article shows, is very different from being a top performing sales person.
Conclusion on Discover Your Sales Strengths
I would never have bought "Discover Your Sales Strengths" by Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano in a book store or from Amazon but I am delighted that thanks to BusinessSummaries I have been able to read this well written, comprehensive summary condensing a 244 page book down to 12 pages.
Because this is not where my expertise lies and I don't recruit sales people, I don't think that I am going to buy the "Discover Your Sales Strengths" so it's a 3 Star rating for me.
The BusinessSummaries report has given me enough information for my needs. When I read some of the reviews on Amazon, I was tempted to change my rating to 4 Stars to indicate that I have added the book to my "read in the future" list.
If you do recruit sales people on a regular basis then, based on the summary I've read, I believe that the "Discover Your sales Strengths" book will certainly give you plenty to think about and the Q12 questions are great to base an individual/role assessment around.
The book is available to buy from Amazon UK or USA.
If you are interested in discovering your own strengths and how they affect the way you work and the results you achieve, I recommend that you read this article - Discover Your Strengths.
Are you making these 11 Common Sales & Selling Mistakes?
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